With continued globalization the need for personal and business interaction between people in real-time over long distances is steadily increasing and also demanding change in the nature of interaction especially with respect to content. Voice communication remains the primary mode for achieving communication. However, increasingly the voice communication is being supplemented by chat sessions including text, audio and video. Lately, there has also been an increasing usage of video conferencing for an improved quality of interaction using software applications like Skype™ to high end dedicated conferencing setups like in tele-presence. Such software also complements the voice and video communication with information sharing, bringing elements of collaboration into the experience.
Despite such advances, the interactions between people in real-time are primarily limited to increased effectiveness in communication with a degree of sharing content of interest between people located at different places. Such interactions have not been able to achieve a shared experience people get in real-time when they are located at the same place. In recent years, new products and services, such as Hangout™ from Google™ allow sharing of audio, video, and image content with video conferencing to enhance the collaboration experience. However, existing products and/or services offer centralized server based services where conferencing and collaboration functions are done on servers. This also requires the users to upload the content to the servers. U.S. patent application Ser. No. 13/763,739 describes a technique that does the conferencing and collaboration functions on the end point exploiting their increasing processing capacity and hence gives the user an option of not having to upload the contents to the servers. Thus, reducing overall latency and improving user experience. However, this technique offers limited flexibility and control both on the host and clients for collaboration given the pre-defined nature of content sharing as full or partial screen sharing.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.